It's nice to see that Zuckerberg's letter actually addresses some key concerns about Instagram's future--a courtesy I haven't seen offered by many recent "acqhirers". However, to echo several other comments, it'll be interesting to see to what degree the stated intentions are actually upheld.
There's the "more information at a glance" marketing angle that Microsoft initially took, but that doesn't strike me as being sufficiently captivating for the average smartphone seeker.
Adam Riess! One of my friends took "Stars and the Universe" with him last semester here at Hopkins and really enjoyed the class (perhaps corroborating the claim that the most capable researchers tend to also be great educators).
So effectively Apotheker was brought in, trashed Palm, spun off the PC division, and now is getting the boot? The suggestion that HP replace the entirety of its upper management, Apple-circa-1996-style, is becoming more and more credible.
"A senior developer is expected to be fluent in client-side and server-side contexts, and know his or her way around Python, Ruby, or whatever other arcane technology requires taming."
There are definitely arcane technologies that developers have deal with, but Python and Ruby? Really?
I would say Google Hangouts emulates chatting in a bar more than any Facebook feature does. Facebook, for me at least, has become the service that I use as a messaging tool, a constantly-updated "social newspaper", and an online rolodex.
Good point. It seems rather unsettling and dishonest if this was the plan all along. I guess in the coming months we'll see how the service evolves (and users react).
"I’ve often thought of Apple as something like Singapore. It’s closed, restrictive, and authoritarian. And there’d deserve to be insurrection if things just didn’t work so damn well"
Witty comparison; I'd never thought about the similarities there.